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NEW YORK — Bernard Madoff’s former right-hand man summed up his boss’ arrest exactly five years
ago with two words: “Madoff Implodes.”

Frank DiPascali’s diary entry for Dec. 11, 2008, was shown to jurors yesterday on the fifth
anniversary of Madoff’s fall. The jurors are hearing evidence in the trial of five of Madoff’s
former employees, who say the New York financier duped them all.

Weeks of testimony in the only criminal trial to result from the collapse of Madoff’s once
high-flying business culminated in the government’s star witness describing the final days of an
epic fraud that cost thousands of investors nearly $20 billion.

On Tuesday, DiPascali told jurors that Madoff was crying when he revealed he was out of money
more than a week before federal authorities and the rest of the world learned the truth.

Madoff’s former lieutenant said Madoff called him into his Manhattan office and told him to
close the door behind him on a day that Madoff, a former Nasdaq chairman, had spent staring out his
window.

“Crying, he said: ‘I’m at the end of my rope. I have no more money,’” DiPascali told jurors in
federal court.

He said he asked his boss what he meant.

“I don’t have any more goddamned money! Don’t you get it?” DiPascali said Madoff responded.

Yesterday, DiPascali said Madoff followed up his Dec. 3, 2008, meeting with him by asking him to
collect boxes of documents to shred. DiPascali said he put together more than two dozen boxes of
documents as Madoff “very meticulously” went over a client list to identify employees and family
members to whom he planned to disburse the nearly $300 million that remained.

DiPascali said he realized Madoff had digressed from his careful plan to notify immediate family
only after consulting his attorney and destroying documents when his wife, Ruth, appeared stunned
as she passed out gifts at the offices on the day of the company’s Christmas party, Dec. 10.

“She looked catatonic,” he said. “She looked horrible, like she was crying all day. Immediately,
I thought he told her.”

DiPascali said he skipped the party and was home the next morning when his cellphone rang.
Madoff was on the line.

“Frank, the FBI is in the office with my brother,” he recalled Madoff telling him.

DiPascali said he asked why Madoff was calling him and promptly “threw the phone across the
room.”